Beggars Ride

by Nancy Kress

  She hadn’t told Jackson that part. He already worried too much about her, and he wouldn’t understand anyway. That was actually funny—Jackson was the smart one, Theresa the one whose IQ modification hadn’t quite worked. Certainly she’d never been very good at school software. But Jackson wouldn’t understand that although he had been right about different personalities being rewarded in different cultures, he hadn’t taken the idea far enough.

  Theresa had. She’d spent thousands of hours at her terminal, slowly and laboriously sending Thomas to search through the history deebees. And she’d found the place that would have rewarded who she was: the Age of Faith.

  She should have been born Catholic. In the late Middle Ages, when men and women had been honored for devoting their lives to the uses of pain in the service of spiritual growth. She would have belonged. To enter an abbey, to have a reason for a cloistered life, joined with others in constant prayer…But she had been born into an age when no one she knew even believed in God. Including her.

  Tears filled Theresa’s eyes. She dashed them away impatiently and moved away from the sight of her naked body in the mirror. It was stupid to cry. She had been born now, not then, and that must be part of the gift, too. She was meant to find another way, a different push toward the light she so often despaired of finding. And after months—years—of meditation and false starts, she had come to see what that way was.

  She must go out.

  Out of the apartment, out of the enclave. Jackson usually urged her not to watch the newsgrids because they made her feel so much worse, and until a few months ago Theresa had been glad to do what Jackson wanted. But lately she had watched holovid whenever Jackson wasn’t home, and although most of the news had of course been about donkeys, there had been glimpses of Livers, too. Between the stock market reports and enclave politics and even an occasional national report from Washington, which nobody seemed to think anymore was anywhere near as important as internal enclave affairs. Just glimpses of Livers, and those Livers were suffering. Not from hunger—not that, ever again. But from lack of things like energy cones and decent clothing and replacement parts for terminals. While people like Theresa and Jackson and Cazie and those loathsome friends Cazie had brought by last night had more things than they knew what to do with. That’s when shame had burned her.

  And then Theresa had seen something on the holovid that made her know she was meant to go outside. There were Livers actually frying to organize into spiritual groups! And the news channel had shown where one of those groups was wintering. The holovid had been sneering, of course…but it had given district coordinates.

  She dressed in one of her long, loose, flowered dresses. Theresa designed them herself, sending sketches and her measurements to a tailoring franchise that would still work in cotton. She found a warm coat—they didn’t have weather voting, outside—and an old pair of boots. But then she hesitated.

  What should she take to give them? Energy cones, yes—she’d already ordered a dozen on the TenTech account, and the mail ’bot had delivered them last week. Theresa hadn’t understood the account very well. Usually Jackson took care of these things. She had used a “proprietary password” he’d once given her, but it must have been the wrong word because the system thought she’d wanted access to factory records. She’d mucked around in them awhile before realizing her mistake; she only hoped she hadn’t caused malfunctions in any system anyplace. After she’d found the household accounts, though, she’d been able to figure out how to order what she wanted. It gave her an odd sense of power, which she immediately distrusted. “Pride goeth before a fall.” Her mother used to say that.

  Clothing. She should bring decent clothing. On the holovid the Livers wore these awful homespun things, or else jacks in truly terrible colors…but all her clothing was cotton or silk. That wouldn’t do. The Livers were all Changed, of course. They needed nonconsumables.

  She went into Jackson’s room and looted his wardrobe. Shirts, pants, tunics, coats, farrells, shoes. He could always order more. And next trip she’d bring some nonconsumable women’s clothes.

  What else? Oh! Money, of course. But how did that work, for Livers? They didn’t use money, or at least they hadn’t, before the Change. They’d all had meal chips and ID cards and the politicians had given them everything free in exchange for votes. Nobody voted anymore, except for enclave elections. Well, of course not…that’s why the Livers were in this position! They didn’t have any money to buy the things they needed. So most of them just went south, where they didn’t need heat or clothes, and fed out in the open, and got into stupid wars, and forgot civilization entirely. But not all of them. The ones Theresa was going to visit could surely use money. But how do you sign over credit to people who don’t have accounts?

  She’d bring a handheld terminal. A mobile. Maybe they had some sort of group account for the organization, or something. Or maybe she could figure out how to set up one in their name, but with access to some of her money. That shouldn’t be too hard. People must set up accounts on the Net all the time. She could leave them the mobile.

  She could do this. She really could. For the first time in her life, after so many false starts, she—Theresa Katherine Aranow—could actually be useful to something larger than herself.

  The black cloud in her head didn’t lift. But it lightened a little, and Theresa smiled.

  On her way out, she passed her main terminal. It was on, holding a screen of her book about one of the first Sleepless, Leisha Camden. Another false start. Theresa knew she wasn’t much of a writer; the book wasn’t very good. But she had wanted to write about Leisha, that outsider from her own people who’d fought so hard to keep Sleepless and donkeys from splintering into two armed camps. Leisha had tried to keep the Sleepless from withdrawing into armed retreat in Sanctuary. She’d tried to keep Sleepers from boycotting all corporations invested in by Sleepless. She’d tried to keep Miranda Sharifi from the same kind of isolation that had driven Miranda’s grandmother to treason.

  Leisha had failed, at all of it. And then the Sleepless had engineered the SuperSleepless and everything got even worse. But Leisha had at least tried. What had driven Leisha, Theresa wondered, before she’d been murdered by outlaw Livers in a desolate Georgia swamp? Something must have driven Leisha. Some light she could see more clearly than Theresa had been able to do.

  At the elevator to the roof, her arms filled with a load of Jackson’s expensive and perfectly tailored clothes, Theresa hesitated. It was so hard to go outside. So many new things…what if she had an attack? Maybe if she first watched a Drew Arlen concert, the one about taking risks…

  Drew Arlen, the Lucid Dreamer. There had been a period, several months long, during which Theresa had watched an Arlen concert two or three times each day. She’d let Arlen hypnotize her, with his subliminals and programmed graphic shapes that seized the unconscious mind, into a different kind of dreaming. Deep, personal, massaged into shape by Drew’s art of mass hypnosis and universal symbols to which he seemed to have easy access. The dream became whatever the listener wanted it to be, needed it to be, and the dreamer awoke cleansed and stronger. Like any other temporary drug.

  No. Not today. She was not going to watch a Drew Arlen concert today, not use it like just another neuropharm. She could do this alone. She could. Today was the day.

  “Good morning, Ms. Aranow,” the elevator said.

  She let it swallow her.

  “Why you doing this, you?”

  “I wanted to…I saw you on the newsgrid. About your…the attempts you’re making to…” Theresa took a deep breath. The man wasn’t tall, but he was thick and bearded and sunburned and scowling. He stood too close to her. Three of them, two men and a woman, had run toward the car as soon as it landed, a respectful distance away from their building. What she hoped was a respectful distance. Her heart raced, and her breath snagged in her throat and wouldn’t come out. Oh, not now, not now…She breathed deeply. The air outside was colder
than she’d expected, and grayer. Everything out here—air, trees, ground, faces—looked cold and gray and hard.

  Theresa turned to the woman. Maybe a woman would be easier. “I know you’re trying to find…to do…the newsgrid said this was a ‘spiritual experiment.’” What the newsgrid had actually said was a “quasi-spiritual attempt at a completely irrelevant human delusion.”

  The second man’s face softened. He was younger, maybe Theresa’s age, skinnier, unbearded. “You’re interested, you, in our ways?”

  “Don’t be taken in, Josh,” the woman said sharply. “She’s donkey, her!”

  “Let’s see, us, who she is,” said the first man. From his pocket he pulled a mobile—were Livers supposed to have those? “On. ID check. Aircar number 475-9886,” followed by code authorizations. How did he know those?

  The terminal said, “Car registered to Jackson William Aranow, Manhattan East Enclave.” It added a citizen number and address. Theresa hadn’t known those were public.

  “I’m Theresa Aranow…Jackson’s…sister.” She tried to breathe normally.

  “And you brought us supplies, you,” the woman said. “Out of the goodness of your heart.”

  “Yes,” Theresa whispered. “I mean, no, I don’t think…I’m that…good…”

  “You all right, you?” the younger man said. Josh. Theresa slumped against the car and he touched her arm. She flinched.

  “I’m…yes. Fine.”

  “Josh, unload the supplies, you,” said the other man. “Might as well have them, us.”

  Theresa made herself breathe normally. She had come this far. “Could I…please see what you’re doing here? Not in exchange for the supplies, but just because I’m…interested?”

  The woman said, “We don’t need no spies, us,” at the same moment that Josh said, “You really interested? In bonding?”

  “Shut up about that!” the woman snapped.

  The two glared at each other. Theresa didn’t remember anything about “bonding” in the newsgrid. She shivered in a sudden gust of wind. It was so cold.

  The older man made a sudden decision. “She can know, her. It’s time people knew. We’re doing what’s right, us, and it’s working, and we know that. We should spread the word, us.”

  “Mike—” the woman began angrily.

  “No, it’s time. And if a donkey’s really interested, her…” He eyed Theresa speculatively.

  “I say no, me,” the woman said.

  “I say yes, me,” Josh said. “Patty, grab some of those cones, you.”

  Patty grabbed, with bad grace. Theresa pulled some of Jackson’s clothes from the car and walked with Josh toward the building, staying as far away from Patty and Mike as she could.

  The building was a huge, flat, windowless rectangle. Maybe once a warehouse of some kind. They didn’t take her inside. Instead, they ducked in one by one to drop off their loads of cones and clothing. Then they led her around to the back of the building. Several more people followed, until there was a small crowd.

  Behind the building a tent of clear plastic stretched over churned-up ground. The tent, held up at its center by spindly poles four feet high, sagged rapidly to edges held to the ground with temporary-looking stakes. Inside was a Y-cone, a feeding ground, and six naked people, in two groups of three each.

  “See, you?” Josh said, not ungently. “Bonded groups, them. Feeding in harmony. That six months ago were enemies, them.”

  “Not enemies,” Patty said sharply.

  “Not friends,” Josh countered. “We had a lot of fighting, us. Like most tribes. It almost made us blow apart, us, go off alone…be isolated.”

  “Which would mean, it, that we was denying our humanity,” Mike said. “Humans are meant to be together, us. Isolated, we ain’t whole.”

  “Oh,” Theresa said. Was he right, this ragged healthy-looking Liver? Was that why her life had felt so empty—because she’d isolated herself? Disappointment seeped through her. It seemed too simple, too…easy. All those isolated ecstatic mystics she’d read about in her library, who saw visions and suffered for truth—they’d needed more than just more company! She searched for something to say that wouldn’t offend her hosts.

  “How did you stop the fighting and…get to be so unified?”

  “Bonding!” Josh said triumphantly. “It was given to us by Mother Miranda, her, and we took it, and now look!”

  “Mother Miranda?” Theresa said. “Are you the same as those people who insist Miranda Sharifi develop an immortality drug?”

  “No,” Mike said. “We don’t insist, us, on nothing. We don’t ask for nothing. But we took the gift, us, when we found it.”

  The gift. “What gift?”

  Josh answered, fervor in his voice. “At first we thought, us, it was more Change syringes. But the new syringes were red, them, not black, and there was a holo to play on our terminal. Miranda Sharifi telling us, her, that this was a gift to start with us, then later go to everyone. The gift of bonding. To make up for the isolation of the Change!”

  “A holo of Miranda Sharifi,” Theresa repeated. Jackson had said that Miranda and her fellow Supers had nanobuilt themselves a lunar base, Selene, after Jennifer Sharifi got out of prison and threw Miranda out of Sanctuary. That had been over a year ago. How was Miranda sending new syringes from the moon?

  “With a new Change,” Mike said. “Bonding. So we can’t ever be alone, us, again. So we have to develop the spiritual aspect of ourselves and get along together. In threes, like the Father and Son and Holy Ghost, them.”

  Theresa looked again at the tented feeding ground. Three people at one end, two women and a man. Three at the other, a man and a woman and a young boy. Around her in the crowd people stood grouped in threes, some groups holding hands. Patty and Mike and Josh had imperceptibly moved from opposite sides of Theresa to form a small huddle facing her.

  “A syringe,” she said. “It held a new drug, and you took it, and—”

  Patty spoke directly to Theresa, looking her full in the face, smiling brutally. “And the drug made us one, it. We can’t move, us, too far away from each other. We are each other’s life!”

  The crowd suddenly intoned, “We are the life and the way. We are the life and the blood. We are the life and the chosen.”

  Josh said eagerly, “You see now, you? We’re a real community, us. The Change syringe divided people, everybody able to go off by hisself, them, to eat and be healthy and live, nobody needing anybody else. But the bonding syringe unites. If Mike or Patty or me get too far away from each other, us, we die.”

  “Die?” Theresa faltered. “Really die?”

  Patty said triumphantly, “Really die. And a bonded group did, them. In another tribe. I saw it, me. The fools didn’t believe Mother Miranda, and the Holy Ghost moved away, her, and in one night the other two died.”

  “But…but what if you have a baby? Does the baby—”

  “We got lots more red syringes, us,” Josh said. “A baby ain’t no problem. It just stay with its mother, him, until it’s old enough to bond with his own group.”

  Theresa felt sick. They wanted so badly to have a reason to need each other, to be a community…but this. It must be done with pheromones. Jackson had explained pheromones to her. Chemicals given off into the air and smelled by other people, even if they didn’t realize. And the chemicals affected people’s behavior…Maybe without the new smell, some poison was set off in the bonded person’s body. But wouldn’t the Cell Cleaner destroy any poison? Wasn’t that what the Cell Cleaner was for? Of course, if Miranda Sharifi had really made them both…would Miranda Sharifi do that? Why?

  A part of Theresa’s mind said softly, Because they remade human bodies in their own image. Now the Supers want to own human brains. No. That was Theresa’s own brain, the part that was so afraid of new experiences and new things, the part that never wanted to leave the apartment. Xenophobia. Inhibition. Agoraphobia. Novelty anxiety. Jackson had taught her the words. It was she who
was mistaken, was blind, didn’t recognize a path up to the light when she saw it…

  No. It wasn’t her. What these people were doing was wrong.

  Her breath went ragged, her heart raced. She felt the attack coming—nausea, dizziness, the terror of not being able to breathe—and flailed one hand, as if she could physically ward it off.

  Patty misinterpreted her gesture. “You don’t believe me, you? Then come see the holo!”

  “No…I…please don’t…” Patty seized her arm and dragged her around the building and inside.

  Livers were there, in threes, crowding close to her and breathing in her face and it was dark and her gorge rose and…

  “Mother Miranda time!”

  The holostage sprang to life. A pretty, meaningless swirl of color, and then Miranda Sharifi appeared, head and shoulders only, the background a plain dark recording booth designed for anonymity. Miranda wore a sleeveless white suit. A red ribbon held back her unruly black hair.

  “This is Miranda Sharifi, speaking to you from Selene. You will want to know what this new syringe is. It’s a wonderful new gift, designed especially for you. A gift even better than the Change syringes were. Those set you free biologically, but also led to much isolation when you no longer needed each other for food and survival. It’s not good for man to be alone. So this syringe, this wonderful gift—”

  Beyond the holostage, in a corner of the warehouse, Theresa saw an unChanged child.

  About two, the child sat propped in a corner, thin flabby legs straight out. One side of its head was empty of hair, the skin eaten into circular patches oozing pus. Rheum trickled from its filmy eyes.

  Theresa’s throat closed entirely.

  “You, my chosen people, the first to know the life and the way—”

  The child whimpered. A girl no older than Theresa darted forward and picked it up. A strong, healthy Liver girl, free of hunger and disease, who could stand by herself and see from clear eyes…Was the unChanged child…could it be in actual pain?